Ethnic breakdown on DNA test results: Problem with Naples, Italy?

Re: Ethnic breakdown on DNA test results: Problem with Naples, Italy?

For anyone that's interested, I just got back my results from a test that I did at 23andme.com. I came back 62% Italian, 24% nonspecific Southern European (total 86% Southern European),6% nonspecific European, 3% Middle Eastern and 5% unassigned. Obviously this is much different than what I got through Ancestry (see my results in my earlier post). It's also much more in line with what I expected.

Again, I'm not doubting their results, but I think they are making a philosophical mistake about how they are deciding to interpret and display the results. Ancestry.com is a genealogy site, yet it appears they are choosing to display and interpret their results based on what must be movements of populations millenia or multi-millenia ago. Based on the knowledge and evidence and seeing how 23andme is displaying their data this seems obvious to me. I suspect they are using data to generate their results that comes from studies that were done trying to pinpoint markers back to their original source rather than the the combinations of markers.

If they were to take what seems to be 23andme's approach they would look at the genetic data they've acculumulated plus the family trees associated with them to make much more accurate, and to a genealogist, relevant predictions. For example, if my closest genetic matches have known ancestors in Naples, then there's a better chance that I have a genetic component from there. This would place our ancestry back into a much more recent time period e.g. a few hundred years, rather than the thousands of years that they must currently be predicting.

Lastly, 23andme.com provides at least 20 times the information that ancestry.com is providing with their results. Even the cousin matching seems better which surprised me since I thought Ancestry would have a larger database.